No swan towels here

My tour book said accurately that tourism has really fallen off in the Sinai since the recent spate of terrorist attacks here.

Last year, in April, 23 people were killed and 64 were wounded when three bombs went off in Dahab, about a block from my hotel. In July 2005, 67 people were killed further south, in the big dive resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, when three other bombs went off. In that attack, Bedouin residents of Sinai with connections to al Qaeda were cited as responsible (although I don’t know how accurate that conclusion is deemed, given it was Egyptians who were making it.)

In 2004, there were other attacks in Taba, the border town that connects Sinai and Israel, and in Ras Muhammed.

In November 2006, 10 people were convicted from some of these attacks: http://www.blogger.com/www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L30883140.htm

Prior to all this, Israelis were the main group of tourists supporting the Sinai economy, but that is not true anymore. I’ve only heard two people speaking Hebrew in the past five days. Most of the victims are Egyptians working in the town, and among the foreigners, most of them are Europeans. Prices for tourists are all quoted in Euros, not in dollars or Egyptian pounds.

But what is curious to me, what is so peculiar about the Egyptian culture, is that even given the tourists they do still have here, they do remarkably little to provide services that would enhance their incomes. They are great at endlessly heckling you and cajoling you into entering their restaurants and buying in their shops (as you might recall from my dreary post in Cairo last year) – but beyond that, they really don’t understand the full concept of a service economy.

For example … yesterday we went diving at the major dive site the Blue Hole. It’s a fairly flat entry into the water, but it is very rocky, and when you have 60 pounds of scuba gear on your back, it’s not particularly easy to walk down into the water.

If this were Mexico, or the Caribbean, there would be a whole line of young, tanned men standing nearby, reaching out their hands to help you stabilize, navigate over the rocks and get in and out. They do it for tips, and, if they are part of the “crew” that has been hired by your dive group, they get a portion of the tips that are always given by divers to the dive master (and the boat captain, if there is one.)

Does this happen here? Uh … no. Not remotely. You have all these tourists, precariously wobbling around trying to get in and out of the water, and you have literally dozens of men standing around doing nothing at all, outside of watching you, drinking their tea and laughing over cigarettes. They’ll try and sell you a Coke, they’ll try and talk you into a taxi ride into the canyon, they’ll try and lure you onto a camel – but will they extend a hand and try to help you not kill yourself? No. That apparently hasn’t occurred to them.

Then there’s the hotel. I’ve been here for five days now, and there hasn’t been room service even once. No change of bed sheets, no mopping of the floor, no putting a fresh towel on the bed folded into the shape of a swan. There are hundreds of hotel rooms up and down this coast – about 95 percent of them sitting empty – and not one of them has any room service. (At least the non-Hiltons ones, like mine, don’t. At $25/night, breakfast included, ours is actually pretty nice with an ocean view and air conditioning, so it’s not remotely ranked bottom of the line, comparatively speaking. But it's clearly not five-star either. As evidenced by the fact we don't have any water much of the day).

You walk up the promenade and there are literally dozens upon dozens of men of every age loitering around. Unemployment is huge here, and the ones who are employed are extremely underemployed. But why is it none of the hotels provide basic daily cleaning service, so at least some of these people could get tips?

This is just a theory – and I don’t begin to know enough about this country to profess to know for sure – but my theory is that the reason there is no room service is because the women aren’t allowed to work. Women can’t work, and room cleaning is considered women’s work, so therefore, no one does it.

Middle- and upper-class women in Cairo work, but they have college degrees and would never have a maid’s job. And the lower class women (which is the majority of them, especially in the Sinai), would never be permitted to work. Bedouin women are illiterate, veiled head to toe, and literally cannot even talk to a man who is not her direct family member. They virtually never even leave their stone, one-room houses. They even send their underage daughters into town to buy bread. As for lower-class Egypt women, whose appearances and behavior are not so severely restricted, they don’t live in the Sinai, for the most part. Only the Egyptian men come here to make money from the tourism industry (along with a spattering of Bedouin men).

It seems to me that the whole entire enterprise of room cleaning and room service is an entire segment of commerce – an entire stream of income – that they appear to not even realize exists. And meanwhile, the average household income in Egypt is about $3,500 a year, and the male unemployment rate hovers around 10.9% -- and sharply higher in the Sinai.

A peculiar country indeed.

For an interesting article just published three days ago by Reuters. on the political situation in the Sinai, see http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSL1942121820070625?pageNumber=1

An another recent article, which among other topics, explains the healthy skepticism toward the Egyptian claim that Bedouins have been behind the tourist attacks: http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=38209.

This article also touches on the huge disparity between the Egyptians and Bedouins, and alludes to the reality that along the coast anyway, it is almost entirely Egyptian-run now. Of the 50 or so hotels in Dahab, only about two are three are owned by Bedouins, and virtually every staffer I’ve come in contact with has also been Egyptian.

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=26596